This is a book of the Starbuck Chronicles. We have reviewed many of this author’s books. The last book of this author we reviewed was Sharpe’s Fortress and the previous book in this sequence we reviewed was Rebel.
The confederate army is planning am ambush and our Starbuck is seated in the army, waiting for action. Nate Starbuck, if he had any sense should leave. The wounded Washington Faulconer hates Nate as Nate killed his prospective son in law, the evil Ethan Ridley in the heat of the battle. Now the ‘war hero’ Washington could get command of a whole Legion with the unit Starbuck was in at its centre – mainly because Washington had created the unit earlier.
Adam, Washington’s son, is a good friend of Starbucks and arrives in the midst of battle. He tells Nate that he met Nate’s brother, James, as a prisoner (James was in the enemy’s army – being a Northerner).
On a hunch, Starbuck disobeys the sergeant’s order and crosses the river at the left flank and ends up behind the enemy. The surprise turned the battle in the rebel’s favour. One touching scene is while Starbuck is trying to kill an enemy officer for not surrendering, the man calls him by his name (Nate) and he realizes that it is his old buddy, when he was up North! The man surrenders, albeit wounded already by Starbuck before the realization.
But James, when released to the North as a prisoner exchange meets Adam, he asks about his brother Nate. Adam gives him all the details of the Southern military secrets, in the belief that only the Northern Victory will end the misery of brother killing brother savagely with ‘a complete absence of Christian love and values’. The huge treachery goes unnoticed.
At the exact same time, Delaney, a senior politician in the South reaches the same conclusion and helps by suggesting and getting the Southern army led by fakes like Faulconer in order to weaken the army strategically. The current chief decided to withdraw, ceding Virginian territory without a fight to the Yankees, much to the chagrin of influential southern elite.
The man chosen for the top job was Falcouner, Adam’s father but a sworn enemy of Nate. When Colonel Bird comes back, he finds Falcouner’s deputy, the brainless but coarse Swynyard as the deputy drunk. It was because Swynward is a relative of the influential newspaper magnate Daniels and he is the one who gave Falcouner the Generalship of the southern army. Knowing that Nate was doomed, Bird sends him away with a Furlough pass to Richmond, Virginia.
Adam is friends with a Reverend’s family and Nate jauntily introduces Sally, his friend Truslow’s daughter whom he had known before but now a prostitute, as Victoria. Adam is in love with the reverend’s daughter Julia and the reverend’s wife is the controlling Mrs Gordon. They then go to help wounded soldiers and Sally is recognized for who she is by the visiting physician and is exposed. Mrs George is humiliated!
The rebels fool the North into thinking that they have a huge number of battalions guarding their eastern flank by repeatedly marching the same platoons over and over and ‘communicating’ with the previous platoons with bullhorns. The North falls for the ruse.
Meanwhile two of the Northern spies go South – John Scully and Lewis Price. James Starbuck leaves instructions with them for his ‘messenger’ (Adam) but that they are captured. While Lewis is defiant, knowing that they will not be put to death (since one is a Scot and the other an Irishman and killing them would offend England, whose support the South was desperately courting), John cracks. He asks for a priest to make a final confession believing himself to be sentenced to hang the next morning and spews the whole information to the ‘priest’. Who was really an officer. So the ‘link’ in the chain, Timothy Webster, who was the go-between but sick, was arrested. Hattie Lawton, his girlfriend was also doomed. The “father” of course was a Rebel officer who is contemptuous of the clumsy spying and the officer sentences them to hard labour because they cannot be executed.
Because of James Starbuck’s name, Nate is arrested and tortured as the traitor in their midst, by Gillespie. He does not know then that it was because Scully’s note mentioned James Starbuck, Nate’s elder brother, as the correspondent from the North and naturally he became the prime suspect.
When they cannot get anything out of them, Alexander orders him released. He then plants a fake response to the message from Scully and asks Nate if he can go North and give it to the army, in a kind of counter trickery. Nate agrees. However, he tells Sally that he is going – and will be back. Sally tells Colonel Delaney the plan and Delaney, who is working for the North, sends an urgent message to the North that Nate is a traitor, thus sealing his fate before he can even arrive!
A brilliant set of twists and counterplots that keep you reading, like Bernard Cornwell does so well.
While Nate is reluctant to expose Adam as the traitor to the South, because of his friendship, Adam does not reciprocate. He also thwarts the Southern General’s plan for a surprise attack on the incoming Yankees by substituting the orders for another inconsequential order to donate part of the troops to a junior officer. Not only is the opportunity lost. Julia gives him the warning that further correspondences with ‘his family’ (ie James) will expose Adam as she heard it from Nate, without understanding its full import.
Now the Confederate general Johnson is frustrated that both the divisions did not obey his order for the surprise attack. He decides to attack anyway and makes great progress driving the Yankees back before meeting a formidable opposition and losing all the territory gained before the end of the day. Johnson swears to get to the bottom of the mystery, terrifying Adam but gets hit critically the same day, to Adam’s great relief.
Meanwhile what should have been a certain capture and hanging of Nate is averted by the intervention of a half Irish half French ‘Observer’ from France called Lassan who helps him run away and cross into Confederate territory. Nate walks boldly into his old army camp to meet Adam who is housed there, notwithstanding that the commanding officer Falcouner, Adam’s father, is known to hate him and will instantly arrest him or worse if he found him anywhere in the vicinity.
He blackmails Adam into taking him back into the legion against the will of General Washington Faulconer, who is livid to see Nate back.
The final battle is told is the inimitable style of Bernard Cornwell. What starts out as an easy Confederate advance is met suddenly with a huge resistance that threatens to turn into a disaster. In a lull, Adam comes waltzing in between two facing armies, having both sides conclude that he has gone completely mad! However, he has a message for Nate and then does an incredible thing which is a nice twist in the series.
This story packs a bunch of twists and turns and the usual tension and the last minute denouement that Bernard Cornwell is so famous for.
A nice read – but in the typical mold of the author and guaranteed to give you a good time.
7/10
== Krishna
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